Wen 丨 Wu Zeyuan
As a movie buff, it's hard not to expect every new novel by Quentin Tarantino. And when it's linked to the keywords "1969," "Hollywood," "The Manson Family Murders," and has a name like "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" with Leone's epic style, it becomes harder to resist it.
But Quentin's new work is indeed a bit disappointing. Quentin said it was his most personal work since the film, and he was right. The attachment to childhood, the love of movies, and the nostalgia for the passing era run through the entire movie: if you understand "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood", you can understand Quentin.
Unfortunately, the most personal Quentin work does not mean that it is the best Quentin work. In fact, the personal nature of "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" just exposes Quentin's inability to deal with narrative techniques, thematic expression, and balancing mainstream aesthetics with personal tastes. Perhaps, Quentin's embarrassment is that the fans who like him are growing up, and when filming "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood", he stopped where he was.
A nostalgic elegy that swallows trivialities
As a film that pays tribute to Leone with its title, the entry point of "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is actually quite interesting. The protagonists of the story are not Hollywood stars like Warren Beatty, Robert Redford and Peter Fonda, who became popular in 1969, but two relatively "nobodys": Leonardo DiCaprio, the dying TV star Rick, and Brad Pitt, Rick's royal action double Cliff.
Such an entry point is very different from Leone's epic vision, but it is somewhat similar to the perspective of the Chilean novelist Bolaño in works such as "Wilderness Detective": digging up the bones buried by time and erecting monuments for people on the edge of history. In an interview with the media, Quentin went out of his way to introduce the inspiration for the character of Rick: Ty Hardin, Vince Edwards, George Maharis...
They were all actors who were eliminated during the transition between old hollywood and new Hollywood; they all tried to jump from television to film, but did not succeed like Bert Reynolds, Steve McQueen, and Clint Eastwood, and had to accept the fate of being forgotten.
The problem is that having such actors as the protagonists of the whole story is not meant to be too interesting: they didn't become famous in part because they didn't have the personal charm of an A-list star or the unique acting skills that the character actors had. And when Quentin chose Leonardo to play Rick, the film's situation was even more embarrassing: Leonardo's temperament was too mainstream and too star-like.
So when we see him in the film, our first reaction must be: this is the third-line actor Rick played by the big star Leonardo, not: this is the third-line actor Rick. Leonardo, meanwhile, was not a personality actor like Samuel Jackson and Christopher Waltz. His mainstream temperament determined that Rick's character would not have the same sharpness as Jules in Pulp Fiction and Hans Landa in Shameless Bastard; the whole film was set to a warm tone.
Quentin's script didn't create much interesting situations for Rick. Rick's "play-in-play" passages on the set of Western dramas are lengthy and trivial like a soap opera, neither as cleverly intertwined between illusion and reality as Mulholland Road or even Birdman, nor as detached drama and quirky raw edges of life as independent films like "Khmeral Rhapsody".
Rhapsody of Kaimara (1995)
As for the scene of Cliff visiting the ranch where the "Manson family" lives, it is extremely dramatic and audiovisual tension, but they are also dissolved in the endless looseness of the whole story. This is the narrative awkwardness of "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood": as a commercial film led by big stars, it is casual like an art film, and if you take it as an art film, its technique and content are too mediocre.
A lost look back at the 1960s
But at the end of the day, "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is a Hollywood blockbuster that takes nearly $100 million at risk (more than $100 million if you add publicity costs). And since Quentin has become the King of Hollywood who can easily dispatch three A-list superstars, Pitt, Leonardo and Marg Robbie, the temperament of his works will surely become more mainstream.
The embodiment of this mainstream in the expression of the theme is the opposing and black-and-white values of "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood": the male Hollywood old-school straight man is "good", the hippie who is addicted to drugs and resists authority is "bad"; the traditional values of middle-aged men are "good", and the radical values of young people with subversive are "bad".
In terms of the brutal slaughter of sharon Tate, the wife of the great director Roman Polanski, by the hippies, Tate is innocent, and the hippies who slaughtered her are heinous and have no problem at all. But if we expand our perspective to the United States throughout the 1960s, Quentin's conclusion is somewhat simplistic.
As Quentin's third work that has tampered with history, "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" follows the binary opposing value pattern of "Shameless Bastard" and "Django Liberated". The problem is that the United States in the '60s was not as black and white as In World War II France and Tennessee during slavery, and the conflict between traditional and hippie values was not so simple.
Polanski, who plays little in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but is crucial to the story, is a striking symbol of the spirit of the '60s: he is both a victim of a murder and a suspect in a rape case. The truth about the '60s is so obscure that any attempt to cram it into a binary template is naïve.
Quentin recreates the ending of Shameless Bastards at the end of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: he rewrites history, allowing Rick and Cliff to kill the hippie mob of the Manson family. Such a quick revenge can indeed allow the audience to get instant emotional catharsis, but for a Quentin who is already in his fifties, we have reason to expect more. Because in a film that uses the iconic event of the 60s, the murder of Sharon Tate, the consideration of historical context and the reflection on the gray area of human nature is entirely necessary.
Movie naughty boy who refuses to grow up
Unfortunately, in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin shows no ability to seriously consider history and times. This is evident in his emphasis on los Angeles in 1969: he painstakingly recreated the theater signs, radio commercials, prime-time soap operas, and Hollywood studios.
But the anti-war marches, student protests, minority civil rights movements, and other pains of the '60s don't leave a shadow in the film. The whole movie seems to float in a giant bubble called pop culture.
In fact, the reason why Quentin can't go further in the thematic expression is because his understanding of the world comes more from movies and television than from life itself. This tendency even becomes more pronounced as he gets older, as you look at one of the most pivotal plot twists in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
The four members of the "Manson Family" are plotting a massacre outside Sharon Tate's house, but after encountering Rick, they quarrel over whether they have seen the TV series starring Rick, and finally decide that Rick is the one who should be killed, because compared with Sharon Tate, Rick, who has been playing the Cowboys of the West, represents a Hollywood-style violence that should be eliminated...
For Quentin, movies and television are more important than life, and perhaps rightly so, part of the reason fans love him is his fan fun. Most of his works are, to some extent, stories of good and evil, but his love of bad tastes in the B-grade film style brings a kind of subversiveness and interest to these simple stories that provoke the "good" tastes of the middle class.
And following his homages and quotes, we can also understand the history of many film sub-genres: "The Dog in the Water" and the heist films, "Dangerous Relationship" and the Blaxpoitation films, "Kill Bill" and the kung fu film, the Japanese sword and the Italian Western, all of which are inseparable; this kind of cross-text pressing is perhaps the greatest pleasure that Quentin's films bring us.
The Falling Dog (1992)
However, in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the film itself and the entertainment industry move from the background of the text to the foreground and become the protagonists of the film. And big stars like Pitt, Lee, and Robbie, like the few dead who were killed with Tate, and the old-school Hollywood filmmakers who appear in the film, can't be joked and joked about. So where does Quentin's favorite subversion, offense, and fun come from? It can only be obtained from the corners and corners where the film meets reality.
So Quentin will use the footage of Cliff beating up women, the rumors of alleged wife-killing, and his slightly offensive remarks to minorities (Don't cry in front of Mexicans) as jokes in the film; so Quentin will portray Bruce Lee as a, bluffing obscenity, because these are some kind of provocation/subversion of the mainstream values and mainstream perceptions of society.
The problem is that a creator should not justify the fantasy component of a fictional story while claiming that bruce Lee is portrayed in such a way that there is a realistic basis for it, even after Lee's friends have defended it. Quentin's assertion of his creative freedom may be justified, because it is completely absurd to completely reject his artistic voice in a cutscene.
But Quentin also needs to understand that creators, since they are involved in reality, are responsible for all the choices they make. He thought he could rely on artistic freedom to be exempt, and at the same time walk freely in the two countries of film and reality, but he firmly encountered the nails of reality.
In the end, "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood", Quentin's most personal film, reflects Quentin's most nowhere to hide childishness. He does not have the ability to examine an entire era, nor can he provide unique insights into historical events. So he made an insurance choice: once again to present a wayward "fairy tale" that rewrites history for everyone.
But the problem is that the best fairy tales are told by adults, not that the more the narrator degenerates himself into a child, the better his fairy tales will be told. There are not many opportunities left for Quentin and his fans, who claim to have only made ten films.
Hopefully, the next time we meet Quentin, we'll see a guy who did Dangerous Relationships and Eight Wicked Men (after all, it's unrealistic to ask him to make another Pulp Fiction or Kill Bill), rather than a guy who made Django Liberated and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.